Internet Shopping Agents (ISAs) allow consumers to costlessly search many online retailers and buy at the lowest price. One would expect these ISAs to subject sellers to intense price competition that results in uniform low prices. Yet, Internet retailers have joined these ISAs. Furthermore, the...

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An important phenomenon on the Internet has been the emergence of "infomediaries" or Internet referral services such as Autobytel.com and Carpoint.com in the automobile industry, Avviva.com in real estate and Healthcareadvocates.com in medicine. These services offer consumers the opportunity to...

An interesting phenomenon has been the emergence of “infomediaries” in the form of Internet referral services in many markets. These services offer consumers the opportunity to get price quotes from enrolled brick-and-mortar retailers and direct consumer traffic to particular retailers who...

The increasing availability of customer information is giving many firms the ability to reach and customize price and other marketing efforts to the tastes of the individual consumer. This ability is labeled as consumer addressability. Consumer addressability through sophisticated databases is...

Strategic trade theory has been criticized on the grounds that its predictions are overly sensitive to modeling assumptions. For example, Eaton and Grossman (1986) show that Brander and Spencer's (1985) seminal result – i.e., when firms compete by setting quantities the optimal policy involves...

We consider a two stage diffrentiated products duopoly model (with linear demand and constant marginal cost). In the first stage prot maximizing owners choose incentive schemes in order to induce their managers to exhibit a certain type of behavior. In the second stage the managers compete...

In many competitive environments, players need to commit either to a specific desired goal they will reach at any cost or to the resources they are willing to spend in pursuit of their goal. We model this situation as a two-stage game where players may compete either by setting input and letting...